Use of the Internet has expanded at a nearly geometric rate in the most recent few years, both in the number of users online and the number of sites and associated content that content providers have made available online. The increases in both categories have enhanced the importance of so-called “portal” sites, such as large Internet access providers and popular Internet search engines. Statistics indicate that an overwhelming majority of traffic to Internet sites passes through such portal sites.
Until recently, Internet search engines have indexed available Internet sites by a process of search and selection. Professionals employed by the search engine sponsor identify and index Internet sites of potential interest to users. In some cases, this process would be embellished by “spidering” identified sites, i.e., traversing links within the site to accumulate word indexes for all reachable pages at the site. Content providers could participate in this process by submitting links to their site to the search engine, but other than through such submissions, could not influence whether these links would be added to the search engine.
Recently, a new model for a paid Internet search engine has been introduced, best exemplified by the site GoTo.com. In a paid Internet search engine, content providers submit bids for each one or more keywords they desire to associate with their site. The paid search engine will respond to a user's request for sites with one or more keywords, by producing a list of links to those sites that have submitted bids on those keywords. The order in which links are identified is determined by the bid amounts provided by the sites—the site with the largest (cumulative) bid(s) for the keywords(s) identified by the user, appears first in the list of sites presented to the user, followed by the site with the second largest (cumulative) bid(s) and so on. Content providers are invoiced the bid amount each time a link to the provider's site is used by a user to access that site.
As paid search engines become increasingly popular, the rate of change of bid amounts at those sites has increased, a consequence of competition for desirable keywords and relative positions in those keywords. To foster competition, paid search engines have provided facilities for bidders to monitor certain statistics, such as a daily count of “hits” on particular keywords, and reports of current bids on a given single keyword. However, paid search engines have not, to date, made such competitive information readily accessible. For example, a bidder can only view current bid positions of one keyword at a time, and has no mechanism for quickly identifying large gaps in bid amounts indicative of an opportunity for bid optimization. For a content provider managing tens or hundreds of keyword bids, the burden of evaluating each keyword individually can be substantial. The apparent reason for this situation is that paid search engines do not wish to incur the lost revenue that would result were the content providers able to fully optimize their bidding strategies, e.g., by quickly determining whether any current bids for keywords of interests can be lowered, without any or any important change in ranking relative to other bidders. A non-optimal bid on any given keyword, meaning any bid with a difference of greater than one cent from the next lower bid, represents consumer surplus captured by the paid search engine, which the search engine sponsor does not wish to relinquish.
To date, few services have been introduced to aid in bidding on paid search engine keywords. One such service accumulates generic statistics on the bid ranges for particular positions (e.g., 6, 12, etc.) for particular keywords at a paid search engine. This data is useful in selecting keywords on which to bid, but does not provide any assistance in managing bids that have been placed to ensure those bids are optimized and that a desired position has been maintained as competitors change their bids for the selected keywords.